Cameroon like others enters e-shopping space

The growth of e-shopping in South Africa and Nigeria is perhaps inevitable. But the more interesting story is how internationally backed start-ups like Jumia are beginning to make inroads into countries that have much smaller markets. Russell Southwood spoke to a couple of key players in Cameroon and Cote d'Ivoire.

In October last year, I wrote about the scale of e-commerce in Nigeria, looking at two internationally backed start-ups, Jumia and Konga. The story that follows looks at Jumia in Cote d'Ivoire and touches on Kaymu in Cameroon, both backed by Rocket.

So why keep the focus on Rocket start-ups? They have been criticized (notably by Jason Njoku, wearing his Spark incubator hat) for not being locally born and having expat leadership.

But for me, the interesting thing about Rocket is precisely that it is internationally-backed and has taken the risky but interesting step of rolling out into 12 countries (Cameroon, Nigeria, Cote d'Ivoire, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania and Angola), the latest being Senegal.